The Zone of Interest "Triumphs" at BAFTAs
By Catherine Shoard
THE GUARDIAN
18th February 2024
Christopher Nolan’s film wins best picture, director, leading and supporting actor, while Emma Stone named best actress – and The Zone of Interest surprises to take three
Christopher Nolan, one of the most celebrated and successful British film-makers of the century, has finally won his first Bafta award, as his biopic of the man behind the atomic bomb took best picture and best director.
Nolan, 54, has previously been nominated for eight Baftas but – bar an honorary award in 2010 – was yet to win one. On Sunday night, Oppenheimer, his Imax epic starring Cillian Murphy as nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dominated the British film industry’s most prestigious prizes, taking seven Baftas, including leading actor for Cillian Murphy and supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr.
Nolan said he felt his film – which concludes with Oppenheimer voicing his fear that the atomic bomb has hastened the end of the world, rather than helped save it – ends with “a dramatically necessary note of despair”. But, he added, many people and organisations had successfully helped further nuclear disarmament, with a 90% reduction since 1967.
That, said Nolan, has now “gone the wrong way. But it’s important to acknowledge their work, which shows the necessary and potential of efforts for peace.” The victories further cement Oppenheimer’s position as frontrunner at next month’s Oscars, where the film is also in the running for 13 awards.
However, the evening’s awards were shared more widely than many expected. Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk fantasy starring Emma Stone as a woman with the brain of a child, took five awards, including leading actress.
Concluding her speech, Stone thanked her mother, “because she’s the best person in the world. Without her, none of this would exist, including my life. So thank you, mom!”
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took three awards, for best sound, outstanding British film – and best film not in the English language. A radical drama about the domestic utopia created by Hedwig and Rudolph Höss in their home just outside the wall of Auschwitz, where he was camp commander, the film was made by Film4 and a British production team, with a German cast and shot entirely in Poland.